Member

by Michael Cisco

  “You’re all lit up, mister.”

  A skinny woman, dressed like an Operational, is looking at me from barracks steps. I’m sitting on the next set over, having just finished bandaging most of my left forearm. I don’t know how many hours it’s been, but it seems like “the day after.”

  “Have fun last night?”

  The impulse to make light conversation is unusual among Operationals. Is this a bit of residual sociability from “last night”? Is this a new gambit of Chorncendantra’s?

  “You could call it that,” I say sheepishly. “Does it show?”

  She gives a short hiccup of laughter.

  “I’ll say!”

  I get up and peer into a darkened window. My whole body glows dimly with a kind of rainy-day blue.

  “Well! I’ll be switched!”

  “Clare must have put the ghostliness on you,” the woman says knowingly.

  “But this was before she and I...” I blurt.

  She’s shaking her head.

  “She called. The call did it.”

  It doesn’t show when I look directly at myself. Only in my reflection. So, is this my own version of the scarlet letter?

  The operational snickers merrily and retires, telling me not to worry, she won’t tell anyone.

  “Oh, that is just peachy.”

  *

  Later, I find Yunis working beside one of the barracks. There’s a storm-cellar sort of door there, and he’s sitting inside it, tools hovering around him like a planetary ring. He glances up at my greeting and then resumes his work without a word.

  “What’s the matter? Aren’t you happy to see me?”

  Yunis looks up at me dourly.

  “Loring told me what you said about me.”

  “Like what?”

  He doesn’t answer, but shakes his head and goes back to his work.

  “I didn’t say a word about you or anybody else to Loring. I never have.”

  I let him examine my face.

  “I’ve got nothing bad to say about you, Yunis.”

  “So Loring lied?”

  “If he told you I said anything about you.”

  “Some of the things he said...”

  “He said, not me.”

  Yunis’s eye softens.

  “It didn’t sound like you.”

  Is this important, who likes me and who doesn’t? What is there to like or dislike anyway? What does anyone know about me? I don’t even know anything about me. So, warm feelings. Enjoy them while they last.

  “What’s all this?” I ask.

  “Heat’s low. Operationals draw in heat when they’re asleep. A lot of heat. They freeze if the barracks aren’t kept red hot.”

  He points with his thumb, underhand.

  “The barracks get heat from the red lights on the artifact, normally. They aren’t working right just now. There’s some change that’s interfering with them.”

  “The artifact changed?”

  “Changes all the time. No fixed function. I mean, not permanently fixed.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re talking about Operationals as if you weren’t one yourself.”

  “Oh, I’m an operational all right,” Yunis says. “The difference is, with me, I have certification.”

  “...Certified to run that thing on your neck, right?”

  “Fibrokinetic mount, yeah. Took me forever to get it, too.”

  “So you don’t join the regular work details?”

  “On the artifact? No. I do work on it, but I do specialty. Specialty work. A lot of the more complicated wiring. Relay stations. And I supervise work on ancillaries, like this. Anything running off the artifact.”

  Yunis straightens up and flexes his body, pressing his lower back.

  “It also means I don’t wear out as quickly as the others do,” he says, his voice a little husky with the stretching. “There’s no pay in it, but there’s, you know, time for time.”

  “Who does the certifying?”

  “Operational Certification Services. You can get technical certification or pneumatic—that’s the religious training. Or associative.”

  “What’s associative do for you?”

  “Gets you in secondary administrative. Runs as a back up in case the primary fails. I think they handle secondhand documents, too. I took technical because I’ve got more a flair, you know, for it. You want to see something?”

  Yunis beckons me to squat down beside him and look back toward the artifact, seeing it as it appears just above the two thick, gleaming cables that run from it to the barracks. Lumps of heat are rising from the cables, throwing dim shadows on the wall, and through the distortion I can see, driving against the base of the artifact looking like the foam of the surf without the surf, webs adrift on nothing.

  “What is that?”

  “Advanced pneumatics,” Yunis says with a brief laugh. “If I knew more about that, I wouldn’t be fooling with a demon heat pump.”

  I tell Yunis about Loring, feathery, the cloud, the young messenger.

  “You say the messenger was a young man?”

  “That’s right. I thought they were all old.”

  “Me too.”

  He’s surprised to hear about Loring’s inclinations, but he can’t shed any light on what I saw.

  “Other camps have their own uniforms and support creatures and things. It’s hard to know who’s on what side. And it’s a sure thing that each side impersonates the other as much as it can... Did you say he gave him a cloud?”

  “Yeah. Is this important?”

  “Just wasn’t sure I’d heard you.”

  I head into the camp. I’m halfway between two barracks when a deafening crash comes from the artifact, followed immediately by a fusillade of bullets from the nearest edge of camp. There’s an open doorway not two steps from me and I clear those two steps in one and throw myself down below window level just inside the door. The barrage sounds like a string of firecrackers, and dies down quickly. The moment I make it inside, I turn and see Loring face down in the street. Come to think of it, I heard an abrupt cry about the moment the bulleting started.

  “How do you know,” I ask Maria, who just so happens to be curled up between a wooden wastepaper basket and a bookshelf nearby, “whether they’re just self-shooting bullets or you’re being invaded?”

  Without bothering to wait for a reply, I scuttle out the door, grab Loring, who stinks of cough drops, and drag him inside. “Is this some goof up at the artifact?” I ask her, raising my voice over the rattle of fresh bullets that knock against the flimsy wooden walls and drive themselves into the dirt of the lane outside with coughing sounds, “That would set them off, wouldn’t you agree, Maria?”

  Maria is preoccupied. She’s clasped her hands behind her neck and has her head between her elbows and that seems to me the heart and soul of sanity just now. Loring moans cough drop breath. There’s darkness spreading across his shoulder.

  “Say, psst! Maria! Psst!” I try to get her attention as I throw some bandages on top of Loring’s wound, “Is this thing over?”

  Another whoosh of whistling air, pings and spocks and breaking glass, coughing. Maria eventually finds the presence of mind to shake her head at me.

  So, I end up going to the infirmary again, but with Loring slung over my shoulder, his hot water bottle sloshing against the small of my back. I get him into a bed.

  “Aren’t there any doctors around here?”

  He cries out sharply, then settles onto the mattress.

  “No,” he says, “No. The High Rationals are all doctors, I mean. Hiring any doctors qua doctors would be redundancy.”

  “So the Operationals just drop dead? Or do the High Rationals—”

  He cuts me off snarling peevishly.

  “What do you know about it? Why are you still here? You should be cleaning toilets!”

  “What toilets? Nobody eats.”

  “It’s no trouble for you,” he says, drawing breath unevenly. “You’re
half a ghost as it is.”

  I laugh. The sound seems ordinary enough to me, but Loring blanches and shrinks from the sound.

  “Oh my, oh my!” He drags his hand down one side of his face. “That was awful!... Why do you laugh like that? Don’t laugh that way again!”

  “All right.”

  I try to make conversation.

  “Haven’t seen Darren lately.”

  Loring smiles nastily. “Neither have I. I expect he’s been busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You know and you won’t tell me,” I sigh. “I wish I gave a damn.”

  “You should.”

  He looks at me meaningfully.

  “Sure sure, like every other conversation in Chorncendantra.”

  “You should realize that Chorncendantra can be lost, in fact that most of the participants lose. Some would have you believe that everyone loses—but that’s a logical impossibility, as I’m sure you can see.”

  “Is this something you can say?”

  “What?”

  “Whether or not you’ve lost?”

  “Oh you know it when it happens!”

  Lying in bed, a flabby, cold, half-empty rubber hot water bottle draped limply over his head, red inflamed nose and eyes in an oatmeal face, thermometer still rattling around in his mouth, limp doughy fingers curling over the end of the covers, one shoulder ineptly bound by me in wads of bloody bandages covering a fresh bullet wound, Loring glares back at me feverishly.

  “And you don’t think you’ve lost?” I ask him.

  His laugh is aborted by gulping and a series of spasms and coughs.

  “Not at all!” he gasps at length.

  As I’m getting him a glass of water, a face at the window makes me start. It’s Guerrero, peering in from the lane outside. Giving no indication that he realizes I’ve seen him, he continues watching us. Is this significant? Does he know? I check an impulse to glance down at myself. Even if I do look different, the Operational, or the girl who was dressed as an Operational, said this is the sign I’ve been called. Not all calls are answered. Guerrero himself acknowledged his wife’s interest in me, so what difference would her calling to me make?

  “Well,” I say, handing Loring the water and getting up again to leave. “I want to take this opportunity to say thanks a lot for this pointful conversation.”

  “What do you expect?” he snaps. “You ask the worst questions I’ve ever heard. It’s a waste of time talking to you. I’m embarrassed every time anybody sees us talking together!”

  I laugh. Loring groans. His eyes turn up toward the ceiling, his face droops, his fingers slacken their hold on the covers and quiver.

  “That’s fun,” I say.

  “Oh goodness!” he mutters. “Oh that was even worse than before!”

  Suddenly Loring stares at me, in bafflement and alarm.

  “What’s happening to you?”

  “Why ask me?”

  Up I get and head for the door. I stop to grin back at him.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Would you please leave!”

  “How about a ‘thank you?’”

  His mouth opens and shuts like a trap.

  “Scram!”

  “Would you like me to show you the banshee again?”

  “Thank you,” he says curtly.

  *

  There’s nothing romantic about what goes on between Clare and me. She treats me like a habit she’s kicking—but then, after ignoring me for days, she gives me the look, and I go to her. We don’t talk. She lets me know, in a hundred other ways, what I’ll be getting myself into if I let this slip out. The air wafts the chime of her triangle to me, like a bird letting out a single chirp. It can reach me anywhere; the note is a little too nasal to be clear. As peremptory as the summons is, she becomes passive and a little unsure the moment we’re alone together, hiding her eyes from me. The desire is there inside her, so strong it tightens her whole body like a guitar string, but she wants or maybe needs me to let it run. After that, she hangs on to me, never releasing me for an instant. Determination straightens her face. She becomes determined to release her determination, and when that happens she looks young, she reverts to being the girl she was twenty years or more ago.

  Once, when business at another camp had called Guerrero away for the night, she abruptly relaxed with me. She explained how the system of the contact sun had been created, eons ago, at the exact site of the big bang. As all the light and energy in the universe flees from this point, it is completely invisible, and receives no light from any outside source. For millennia at a time, the system is dead, like a gigantic shipwreck icebound in space. The two star machines in the center glide around each other in a wary, fantastically slow spiral that gradually brings them closer together, even though they appear to be motionless. In time, their atmospheres touch, and a spark bridges the gap between them. The spark of the contact sun is continuous and fixed, like the arc in an electric lantern; it emits very little visible light, but only an infernal heat that suffuses the entire system like the blast from an open hearth. Each of the planets is tethered to the atmosphere engulfing the star machines with leashes of gas, because electricity doesn’t travel in a vacuum. These ropes of gas not only keep the planets in their precise arrangements, exactly counterweighted pairs in each orbital plane and equidistant from the center, but they also link the whole system together to form a vast electrical circuit.

  Electricity plays the role that light ordinarily performs in a natural star system. Although she isn’t sure, Clare suspects secrecy is the reason for this aversion to light. No one was meant to discover the system on their own. It was to be concealed, like the mystery chamber at the center of the labyrinth. I ask her how the gas tethers are fixed to the planets, and she says:

  “Tension of hypo-surfaces.”

  When the spark returns, the thirty-two planets return from the dead. Each world is endowed with an immortal custodian, who lies inert during the long desolation, thinking listless, disjointed, inchoate thoughts. When the spark returns, these custodians perk up, and, each with the assistance of a unique machine, revive life on their particular planet. The corpses thickly littering the surface begin to stir with new life under a black sky without stars, only the barely-visible surfaces of the other planets in the system as their paths cross in the void, and the faint spark of the contact sun, oddly attenuated in shape by the shadowy discs of the two star machines. They don’t rot, because the decomposers die when all other things die. They don’t disintegrate, because there is no weather on dead worlds.

  Chorncendantra is the name of the game, but only this time around. There have been others, and—who knows how far in the future?—new games will succeed it. Each game lasts until the contact sun is extinguished again, but no one knows how to determine when that will happen.

  “When the contact sun is out, we all lie like Frankenstein monsters waiting to be resurrected. None of us can take notice of the time. The caretakers are too stupefied. They can’t measure the time.

  “Since no light from any other part of the universe reaches the system of the contact sun, there is no way to determine how much time has passed once we’ve revived, by checking the position of the stars.

  “The two star machines orbit each other in a labyrinthine pattern, most of which can be observed only during the dead time, when no one watches. So, no one can predict their movements. There are no indications, apart from the flickering of the spark, which happens only for a very brief period before the spark fails altogether, that can give anyone any sense of the lifespan of the game.

  “When the flicker starts, the players hurry to complete the game, and they always end up making a mess. Even if they always do end.

  “It isn’t likely anything worse than a scandal, a general demoralization, would result if the game weren’t finished. Perhaps we might not ‘sleep’ as well, when life ends.

  “...Yes, there ar
e records of bygone games, but no one bothers to read them. Pretty dry stuff, if you ask me. The records aren’t kept in one place, and they’re in all kinds of disorder and run the gamut of different states of decay. Incompletion.”

  “What about a recording machine?”

  “Interesting idea. Some potential in that. It’s never been tried, I think. Not that I know: perhaps there might be something in the records about one.”

  A broad plateau surrounded by high, dark peaks. The surface of the plateau shimmers like shallow, tumbling tidewater all covered in tiny lozenges of intense light. The ground, the stones, all sparkle painfully with glints strung together like beads. Human-like figures, nothing more than ragged interruptions in the glare, stagger at random. At times their arms and legs seem to flex in the wrong places, but that could be a distortion of the image, produced by the strange lights. There is something else that contributes to a feeling of restricted vision, almost like wearing a helmet, and an overmastering urge to veer back and forth like a fleeing gazelle, as if it were necessary to run down and snatch each lungfull of breatheable air. So this is Clare’s planet. The sky is a white haze that twinkles with reflected light from the electrified ground. Anyone on the surface must keep moving to avoid being shocked, or maybe those jolts to the leg muscles propel the surface dwellers from here to there, and everyone is dying to stand still.

  Gradually I realize that what they are searching for isn’t air, it’s travelling vantage points, like keyholes dancing through space. Every now and then, for a single instant, one of these groping figures will catch a glimpse of things from this particular standpoint: the scintillation exhibits a distinct pattern, and certain normally invisible man-machines or man-plants become visible. Then the vantage point is gone again, and the searcher pursues it again with redoubled vigor, and a firm grip on a handful of memories.

  “That’s where I’m from,” I think. “I remember wandering, chasing after the pattern. I remember, too, those moments of bliss, when I watched the pattern emerge, and was transfixed by it. It would gather more and more meaning into itself, becoming the entirety of my mental life. One after another, my fuses would blow.”

  I look down at Clare, turned away from me a moment, her white shoulder in the air. This is all wrong. Getting it wrong, though, is the only freedom I’ve ever had.